Tories to 'sever links' with academic selection

Link: Tories to 'sever links' with academic selection | Uk News | News | Telegraph.

Perhaps to a shadow education secretary who went to the King Edward's School in Birmingham and a leader of the Opposition who went to Eton College this makes some sense. Perhaps to them, embracing the failed educational radicalism of the 1960's is in some way hip. To someone who actually went to a comprehensive school, it is nothing less than a betrayal.

Nothing has damaged Britain more in my lifetime than comprehensive education. Ask my young relative who was reduced to pleading with his teacher to be allowed to work in a store cupboard so that he could be away from the chaos in his classroom. Ask Frank Chalk. The Soviet Union was never so ultra-left as to believe that one size fits all when it comes to schooling. The British Conservative Party is now officially to the left of the CPSU.

If the Grammar School system "entrenches advantage", why has social mobility declined since it was - for the most part - abolished? According to research from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science;

• In a comparison of eight European and North American countries, Britain and the United States have the lowest social mobility
• Social mobility in Britain has declined whereas in the US it is stable
• Part of the reason for Britain's decline has been that the better off have benefited disproportionately from increased educational opportunity

The researchers concluded that social mobility has declined over the last 30 years in Britain and that this is in part due to:

the strong and increasing relationship between family income and educational attainment

Precisely the relationship in fact  that was, for a brief time in British education, broken by the Grammar Schools. Comprehensive schools are so destructive of working class opportunity that they might as well have been designed to keep clever working class children "in their place."  Sometimes, I think they were.

h/t Bel is Thinking

Comments

[Tom]

Shuggy, I don't even consider it because I see no sign of it. Until I was 12 I lived in a rented two-up two-down terraced house with a shared outside chemical toilet. Do you know any honest working people living like that now? It's complete nonsense to say that the gap has widened. After generations of penal taxation and confiscatory death taxes, do you really think the British rich are richer? Where the hell do you live?

The gap has not widened but deepened. Either the Left did that through stupidity, or they did it deliberately. I know it's dangerous to suspect a conspiracy when a cock-up is an adequate explanation, but in this case I can't help it. I suspect Labour realised that if a bright working class kid had opportunities he might just take them - and become a Tebbit, Thatcher or Parkinson rather than "know his place" as dimwitted voting fodder for the the likes of Fettes-educated Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

It now takes a miracle for a kid like I was to escape his background. It used to just take a grammar school, talent and effort. Labour did that to Britain's working classes. I hate them for it with a passion.

[John Miller]

Of course, now that even the most menial of MPs (are you listening Ms Abbott)earns a fortune and, if that's not enough there's the fiddled expenses (£22,000 in stationery in one month ffs - LibDem MP Lynne Featherstone) - why should they care about state education? For them its the usual Socialist exercise in their political outlook, whilst practically, they adopt a Tory approach. For The Good Of Their Children, naturally. Tory, Lib Dem, NuLab all want to keep the proles and middle class where they are, whilst their progeny leave their public schools to swan around at the top of society.

[Shuggy]

"If the Grammar School system "entrenches advantage", why has social mobility declined since it was - for the most part - abolished?"

Because the distance between rich and poor has grown? 'Social mobility' simply requires a much longer journey than it used to. This may or may not serve as an explanation but you don't even *consider* this. Why not?

What evidence is there that the school system a country has makes so much difference? Where's the international comparisons? Germany, as I understand it, use educational selection and has greater social mobility than either the USA or the UK. But then again so does Finland, which has a fully-comprehensive system. Both Germany and Finland have a lower level of income-inequality than either the UK or the US. Unless you're suggesting this is a weird co-incidence, you should at the very least accept there are a few other possible variables that you haven't considered here.

[Man in a Shed]

I don't think grammer schools are perfect - but they are so much more effective than the current system. Perhaps a bit on tinkering, with school transfers at older ages might be considered.

But in essence I with you on this - and very worried about what this says about the party I support. Peter Hitchens did a Dispatches program on David Cameron a few weeks ago on C4. I hope he's wrong - but the stuff Oliver Letwin and co are coming out with makes me wonder.

David Cameron has done wonders for the party - and I voted for him as leader - but in my darker moments I worry.

[Guthrum]

I agree as somebody who was able to enjoy social mobility through going to a Grammar School, is not about excellence any more, just conformity,statis and control